The Big Book List

Looking for some classic books to add to your list? Here is a massive list (in alphabetical order, of course) with book titles taken from The Classic Club’s Members. Don’t see a title that should be on here? Comment below and we’ll add it!

All books are listed by author’s name (last name first), then title. Please let us know if we need to correct/edit anything!

(For more resource help while building your list, you might also check out this list at Goodreads, of the most popular books listed under the label “the classics club.”)

A-

Abbott, Edwin: Flatland

Achebe, Chinua: Things Fall Apart

Adams, Richard: Watership Down

Aeschylus: Oresteia

Albee, Edward: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Alcott, Louisa May: Jo’s Boys, Little Men, Little Women

Allende, Isabel: The House of the Spirits, Stories of Eva Luna

Amis, Martin: London Fields

Anaya, Rudolfo: Bless Me, Ultima

Anderson, Sherwood: Winesburg, Ohio

Angelou, Maya: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Anonymous: Beowulf, One Thousand and One Nights

Apuleius, Lucius:  The Golden Ass

Aristophanes: Lysistrata

Aristophanes: The Frogs

Aristotle: Nichomachean Ethics

Arlt, Robert: The Seven Madmen

Arnow, Harriette: The Dollmaker

Atwood, Margaret: Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin, A Handmaid’s Tale

Aubrey, John: Brief Lives

Austen, Jane: Emma, Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey,  Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility

Azuela, Mariano: The Underdogs

B-

Baldwin, James: Giovanni’s Room, Go Tell it on the Mountain

Balzac, Honore: The Black Sheep, Eugenie Grandet

Barrie, J.M.: Peter Pan

Baum, L. Frank: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Beckett, Samuel: Waiting for Godot

Bellamy, Edward: Looking Backward

Bellow, Saul: The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King, Seize the Day

Bengtsson, Frans G.: The Long Ships

Bennett, Alan: The Uncommon Reader

Bernstein, Hilda: The World that was Ours

Boccaccio, Giovanni: The Decameron

Borges, Jorge Luis: The Aleph, Ficciones

Bradbury, Ray: Fahrenheit 451, The Illustrated Man, The Martian Chronicles

Braddon, Mary Elizabeth: Lady Audley’s Secret

Bronte, Anne: Agnes Grey, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Bronte, Charlotte: Jane Eyre, The Professor, Shirley, Villette

Bronte, Emily: Wuthering Heights

Brooks, Terry: The Sword of Shannara

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett: Aurora Leigh

Buck, Pearl S.: The Good Earth

Bulgakov, Mikhail: The Master and Margarita

Buchan, John: The Thirty-Nine Steps

Bunyan, John: Pilgrim’s Progress

Burgess, Anthony: A Clockwork Orange

Burke, Edmund: A Philosophical Enquiry

Burnett, Frances Hodgson: A Little Princess, The Making of a Marchioness, The Secret Garden, The Shuttle

Burney, Frances: Evelina

Burns, Olive: Cold Sassy Tree

Burroughs, Edgar Rice: Tarzan of the Apes

Butler, Samuel: Erewhon, The Way of All Flesh

Byron, Lord: Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Don Juan, Manfred

C-

Calvino, Italo: If on a Winter’s Night a Stranger, Italian Folktales

Camus, Albert: The Fall, The Plague, The Stranger

Carroll, Lewis: Alice in Wonderland

Cather, Willa: Death Comes for the Archbishop, My Antonia, O Pioneers!, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, Shadows on the Rock, The Song of the Lark

Chaucer, Geoffrey: The Canterbury Tales

Chekhov, Anton: The Cherry Orchard, Three Sisters, Uncle Vanya

Chopin, Kate: The Awakening, Desiree’s Baby

Chukovskay, Lydia: Sofia Petrovna

Coetzee, J.M: Youth

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Colette:  Chéri, Gigi, Sido

Collins, Wilkie: Armadale, The Moonstone, No Name, The Woman in White

Collodi, Carlo: The Adventures of Pinocchio

Confucius: Analects

Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim

Cooper, James Fenimore: The Deerslayer, The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder

Crane, Stephen: Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, The Red Badge of Courage

D-

Dante: The Divine Comedy

Darwin, Charles: The Origin of Species

de Cervantes, Miguel: Don Quixote

de Crevecoeur, J. Hector St. John: Letters from an American Farmer

de Laclos, Choderlos: Dangerous Liaisons

de Quincy, Thomas: Confessions of an English Opium Eater

de Sade, Marquis: The 120 Days of Sodom

de Saint-Exupery, Antoine: The Little Prince

Defoe, Daniel: Moll Flanders, Robinson Crusoe, Roxana

Descartes, Rene: Meditations on First Philosophy

Dickens, Charles: Barnaby Rudge, Bleak House, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Dombey and Son, Great Expectations, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, Martin Chuzzlewit, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, Oliver Twist, Our Mutual Friend, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick club, ATale of Two Cities

Dickens, Monica: The Winds of Heaven

Dickenson, Emily: The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson

Djebar, Assie: Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade

Dorr, David: Colored Man Round the World

Dostoevesky, Fyodor: The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Notes from the Underground

Douglass, Frederick: My Bondage and My Freedom, A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan: The Complete Sherlock Holmes, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Lost World

Dreiser, Theodore: An American Tragedy, Sister Carrie

Du Maurier, Daphne: My Cousin Rachel, Rebecca

Dumas, Alexandre: The Black Tulip, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Man in the Iron Mask, The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After, The Vicomte de Bragelonne

Durak, Mary: Kings in Grass Castles

E-

Eco, Umberto: The Name of the Rose

Edgeworth, Maria: Belinda, Castle Rackrent

Eliot, George: Adam Bede, Daniel Deronda, Middlemarch, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner

Eliot, T.S.: The Complete Poems, Murder in the Cathedral, The Waste Land

Ellison, Ralph: The Invisible Man

Emerson, Ralph Waldo: Essays, Self-Reliance and Other Essays

Endō, Shūsako, The Sea and Poison, Silence

Equiano, Olaudah: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano

Euripedes: Electra, Medea, Orestes

F-

Faulkner, William: Absalom, Absalom!; As I Lay Dying; The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion; Light in August; Sanctuary; The Sound and the Fury

Faulks, Sebastian: Birdsong

Ferrier, Susan: Marriage

Fielding, Henry: Joseph Andrews, Shamela, Tom Jones

Fitzgerald, F. Scott: The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, The Last Tycoon, Tales of the Jazz Age, Tender is the Night, This Side of Paradise

Flaubert, Gustav: Madame Bovary

Ford, Ford Madox: The Good Soldier, Parade’s End

Forster, E.M.: Howard’s End, Passage to India, A Room With a View, Where Angels Fear to Tread

Fowles, John: The Collector, The French Lieutenant’s Woman

Frank, Anne: The Diary of Anne Frank

Frank, Pat: Alas, Babylon

Franklin, Benjamin: 1726 Journal, Autobiography

Franklin, Miles: My Brilliant Career

Freud, Sigmund: The Interpretation of Dreams

Frost, Robert: Collected Poems, New Hampshire

G-

Gaines, Ernest: A Lesson Before Dying

Gaskell, Elizabeth: Cranford, Mary Barton, North and South, Sylvia’s Lovers, Wives and Daughters

Gibbons, Stella: Cold Comfort Farm

Ginsberg, Allen: Howl and Other Poems

Glaspell, Susan: Fidelity

Goethe, Johann: Faust, The Sorrows of Young Werther and Selected Writings

Gogol, Nikolai: Dead Souls, The Overcoast

Golding, William: Lord of the Flies

Gordon, Lucie Duff: Letters from Egypt

Greene, Graham: Brighton Rock, A Burnt-Out Case, The End of the Affair, The Heart of the Matter, The Third Man, Travels with My Aunt

Grossmith, George and Weedon: The Diary of a Nobody

H-

Haasse, Hella S.: In a Dark Wood Wandering

Haggard, H. R.: King Solomon’s Mines

Hamilton, Edith: Mythology

Hammett, Dashiel: The Dain Curse, The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man

Hamsun, Knut: Growth of the Soil, Hunger

Hansberry, Lorraine: A Raisin in the Sun

Hardy, Thomas: Desperate Remedies, Far From the Madding Crowd, Jude the Obscure, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Return of the Native, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, The Woodlanders

Hartley, L. P.: Eustace and Hilda, The Go-Between

Hawthorne, Nathaniel: The Blithedale Romance, The House of the Seven Gables, The Scarlet Letter

Heller, Joseph: Catch-22

Hellman, Lillian: The Little Foxes

Hemingway, Ernest: A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, A Moveable Feast, The Old Man and the Sea, The Sun Also Rises, To Have and to Have Not

Henry, O: Collected Stories

Herbert, Xavier: Capricornia, Poor Fellow My Country

Hesse, Hermann: Siddhartha, Hesse, Hermann: Steppenwolf

Holtby, Winifred: South Riding

Homer: The Iliad, The Odyssey

Horace: Satires

Hugo, Victor: The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Les Miserables

Hume, David: A Treatise of Human Nature

Hurston, Zora Neale: Dust Tracks on a Road, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Huxley, Aldous: Antic Hay, Brave New World

I-

Ibsen, Henrick: A Doll’s House, An Enemy of the People, The Master Builder

Imlay, Gilbert: The Emigrants

Irving, John: A Prayer for Owen Meany, The World According to Garp

Irving, Washington: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Rip Van Winkle

Ishiguro, Kazuo: Never Let Me Go, The Remains of the Day

J-

James, Henry: The Ambassadors, The Aspern Papers, The Bostonians, Daisy Miller, The Golden Bowl, The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove, The Turn of the Screw, Washington Square, What Maisie Knew

Jerome, Jerome K: Three Men in a Boat

Jewett, Sarah Orne: The Country of the Pointed Firs

Johnson, Samuel: Dictionary of the English Language, The History of Rasselas, The Idler, The Plays of William Shakespeare

Jonson, Ben: The Alchemist, Bartholomew Fair, Volpone

Joyce, James: The Dubliners, Finnegans Wake, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses

K-

Kafka, Franz: The Metamorphosis, The Trial

Kawabata, Yasunari: Snow Country

Keats, John: Complete Poems

Keller, Helen: The Story of My Life

Kempe, Margery: The Book of Margery Kempe

Kerouac, Jack: On the Road

Kesey, Ken: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Kipling, Rudyard: Kim, The Man Who Would Be King

Knowles, John: A Separate Peace

L-

Lagerlöf, Selma: The Wonderful Adventures of Nils

Laski, Marghanita: Little Boy Lost

Laurence, Margaret: The Stone Angel

Lawrence, D.H.: Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Sons and Lovers, Women in Love

Laxness, Halldór: Independent People, World Light

Lee, Harper: To Kill a Mockingbird

Lermontov, Mikhail: A Hero of Our Time

Leroux, Gaston: The Phantom of Opera

Lewis, M.G: The Monk

Lewis, Sinclair: Arrowsmith, Babbitt, Elmer Gantry, Main Street

Lindsay, Joan: Picnic at Hanging Rock

Locke, John: Second Treatise of Government

London, Jack: The Call of the Wild, The Sea Wolf, White Fang

M-

Machiavelli, Niccolo: The Prince

Mackail, Denis: Greenery Street

Mailer, Norman: Armies of the Night, The Executioner’s Song, The Naked and the Dead

Malory, Sir Thomas: Le Morte d’Arthur

Mann, Thomas: Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain

Mansfield, Katherine: The Garden Party & Other Stories, The Montana Stories, Selected Stories

Markandaya, Kamala: Nectar in a Sieve

Marlowe, Christopher: Doctor Faustus

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia: Love in the Time of Cholera, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels: The Communist Manifesto

Maturin, Charles: Melmoth the Wanderer

Maugham, W. Somerset: Of Human Bondage, The Painted Veil, The Razor’s Edge

Maupassant, Guy de: Bel-Ami, Selected Stories, Une Vie

McCullers, Carson: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Melville, Herman: Bartleby the Scrivener, Billy Budd, Moby Dick, Typee

Mill, John Stuart: Utilitarianism

Millay, Edna St. Vincent: Collected Poems

Miller, Arthur: All My Sons, The Crucible, Death of a Salesman, A View from the Bridge

Milton, John: Paradise Lost

Mishima, Yukio: The Sailor who fell from Grace with the Sea

Mitchell, David: Cloud Atlas

Mitchell, Margaret: Gone with the Wind

Moberg, Vilhelm: The Emigrants

Moliere: The Misanthrope

Montaigne, Michel de: Selected Essays

Montgomery, L.M.: Anne of Green Gables, Rilla of Ingleside

More, Thomas: Utopia

Morrison, Toni: Beloved, The Bluest Eye, Home, Jazz, The Song of Solomon, Sula

Muir, John: Writings on Nature

Mulisch, Harry: The Discovery of Heaven

Murakami, Haruki: Norwegian Wood

N-

Nabokov, Vladimir: Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, Lolita, Pale Fire, Pnin

Nesbit, E: The Enchanted Castle

Nichol, James W.: The Stone Angel

Nietzsche, Friedrich: Beyond Good and Evil, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Niland, D’Arcy: The Shiralee

O-

O Henry: Collected Stories

O’Brien, Tim: The Things They Carried

O’Connor, Flannery: Everything that Rises must Converge, A Good Man is Hard to Find, Wise Blood

O’Neill, Jamie: At Swim, Two Boys

Orczy, Baroness: The Scarlet Pimpernel

Orwell, George: 1984, Animal Farm,  Homage to Catalonia

Ovid: Metamorphoses

P-

Paine, Thomas: Common Sense

Pamuk, Orhan: My Name is Red

Panter-Downes, Mollie: One Fine Day

Pascal, Blaise: Pensées

Pasternak, Boris: Doctor Zhivago

Paton, Alan: Cry, the Beloved Country

Peake, Mervyn: The Gormenghast Trilogy

Pepys, Samuel: Diary of Samuel Pepys

Plath, Sylvia: Ariel, The Bell Jar, The Journals of Sylvia Plath

Plato: The Trial and Death of Socrates

Plutarch: Moralia, Parallel Lives

Poe, Edgar Allan: Collected Stories and Poems

Pope, Alexander: Dunciad, Eloisa to Abelard, An Essay on Criticism, An Essay on Man, The Rape of the Lock

Pound, Ezra: Personae: The Shorter Poems

Powell, Anthony: A Dance to the Music of Time

Proulx, Annie: The Shipping News

Proust, Marcel: Remembrance of Things Past, Swann’s Way

Pushkin, Alexander: The Bronze Horseman, Eugene Onegin, The Stone Guest, The Tales of Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin

Pyle, Howard: The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, The Story of King Arthur and His Knights

Pym, Barbara: Excellent Women

R-

Rabelais, Francois: Gargantua and Pantagruel

Radcliffe, Anne: The Italian, The Mysteries of Udolpho

Rand, Ayn: Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, We the Living

Remarque, Erich Maria: All Quiet on the Western Front

Rhys, Jean: Wide Sargasso Sea

Richardson, Henry Handel: The Fortunes of Richard Mahony

Richardson, Samuel: Clarissa, The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Pamela

Robinson, Marilynne: Gilead, Housekeeping

Rolland, Romaine: Jean-Christophe

Rossetti, Christina: The Goblin Market and Other Poems, In the Bleak Midwinter

Rostand, Edmond: Cyrano de Bergerac

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: On the Social Contract

Rowson, Susanna: Charlotte Temple

Rushdie, Salman: Midnight’s Children, The Satanic Verses

S-

Salgari, Emilio: The Pirates of Malaysia

Salinger, J.D.: The Catcher in the Rye; Franny and Zooey; Nine Stories; Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction;

Sand, George: Consuelo

Sappho: Poems

Schreiner, Olive: The Story of an African Farm

Scott, Sir Walter: The Bride of Lammermoor, The Heart of Midlothian, Ivanhoe, The Lady of the Lake, Rob Roy, Waverly

Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

Seton, Anya: Katherine

Shakespeare, William: All’s Well That Ends Well, Antony and Cleopatra, As You Like It, The Comedy of Errors, Coriolanus, Cymbeline, Hamlet, Henry V, Julius Caesar, King Lear, Love’s Labor’s Lost, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest, Titus Andronicus, Trolius and Cressida, Twelfth Night, Two Gentlemen of Verona, A Winter’s Tale

Shaw, George Bernard: Major Barbara, Man and Superman, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Saint Joan

Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein

Shelley, Percy Bysshe: Collected Poems

Shikibu, Murasaki: The Tale of Genji

Shirer, William: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

Shonagon, Sei: The Pillow Book

Silko, Leslie Marmon: Ceremony

Sinclair, Upton: The Jungle

Smith, Betty: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander: Cancer Ward, The First Circle, The Gulag Archipelago, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Sophocles: Antigone, Oedipus at Colonus, Oedipus Rex

Soseki, Natsume: Kokoro, Light and Darkness

Spark, Muriel: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Steinbeck, John: Cannery Row, East of Eden, The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, The Pearl, The Red Pony, Tortilla Flat, Travels with Charley in Search of America, The Winter of Our Discontent

Stendhal: The Charterhouse of Parma, The Red and the Black

Sterne, Laurence: The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy

Stevenson, Robert Louis: Kidnapped, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Treasure Island

Stoker, Bram: Dracula

Stoppard, Tom: Rosencratz and Guildenstern are Dead

Stowe, Harriet Beecher: Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Strachey, Julia: Cheerful Weather for the Wedding

Strachey, Lytton: Eminent Victorians

Stratton-Porter, Gene: Freckles, A Girl of the Limberlost

Streatfield, Noel: Ballet Shoes, Saplings

Swift, Jonathon: Gulliver’s Travels

T-

Tennyson, Alfred: Idylls of the King

Thackeray, William Makepeace: Vanity Fair

Thiong’o, Ngugi wa: A Grain of Wheat

Thoreau, Henry David: Civil Disobedience, Walden

Tieck, Johann Ludwig: Wake not the Dead

Tolkien, J.R.R.: The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings

Tolstoy, Leo: Anna Karenina, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, War and Peace

Trollope, Anthony: Barchester Towers, Doctor Thorne, Framley Parsonage, The Last Chronicle of Barset, The Small House at Allington, The Warden, The Way We Live Now

Truth, Sojourner: Narrative of Sojourner Truth

Turgenev, Ivan: Fathers and Sons, First Love

Twain, Mark: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, The Prince and the Pauper, Pudd’nhead Wilson, A Tramp Abroad

Tyler, Royall: The Algerine Captive

Tzu, Sun: The Art of War

V-

Verne, Jules: Around the World in Eighty Days, From the Earth to the Moon, Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Mysterious Island, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

Virgil: The Aenid

Voltaire: Candide

Vonnegut, Kurt: The Cat’s Cradle, Slaughterhouse Five

W-

Walker, Alice: The Color Purple

Walpole, Horace: The Castle of Otranto

Watson, Winifred: Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day

Waugh, Evelyn: Brideshead Revisited, Decline and Fall, A Handful of Dush, Vile Bodies

Webster, John: The White Devil

Welch, James: Riding the Earth Boy, Winter in the Blood

Wells, H.G.: The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds

Werfel, Franz: The Forty Days of Musa Dagh

West, Nathanael: Day of the Locust, Miss Lonelyhearts

Wharton, Edith: A Backward Glance-Autobiography

Wharton, Edith: The Age of Innocence, The Buccaneers, The Custom of the Country, Ethan Frome, The House of Mirth, Madame de Treymes, Roman Fever, Sanctuary, Stories of Old New York, Summer

Whipple, Dorothy: Greenbanks, Someone at a Distance, They Knew Mr. Knight

White, Patrick: The Tree of Man

White, T.H.: The Once and Future King

Whitman, Walt: Leaves of Grass

Whittier, John Greenleaf: Snow-Bound

Wilde, Oscar: An Ideal Husband, The Importance of Being Earnest, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Wilder, Thornton: Our Town

Williams, John: Stoner

Williams, Tennessee: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Sweet Bird of Youth

Wollstonecraft, Mary: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Woolf, Virginia: Jacob’s Room, Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, A Room of One’s Own, To the Lighthouse

Wouk, Herman: The Winds of War

Wright, Richard: Native Son

Wyndham, John: The Day of the Triffids

X-

Xueqin, Cao: Dream of the Red Chamber

Y-

Yeats, William Butler: Collected Poems, Irish Faerie Tales

Z-

Zamyatin, Yevgeny: We

Zola, Emile: Germinal, Nana, Therese Raquin

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Last Updated: 5 December 2012 (RBR)

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